BIG DATA ANALYTICS FOR EXPANDING ALICE ANALYSIS FOR THE UNITED STATES
Price, Adam Daniel · Digital Repository at the University of Maryland (University of Maryland College Park) · 2015
In 2009, the United Way of New Jersey conducted a study of every county in the state to determine if families were falling out of the middle class but staying above the poverty line. This group and new income level was termed ALICE or Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed. This work was highly influential, inspired additional research and was later discussed in an article in the Washington Post. However the article implied that the plight of New Jersey was representative of the rest of the United States. This particular article also did not bother to offer any additional evidence or original research beyond what was discussed for the state of New Jersey. To improve upon the work reported in the Washington Post, we collected and put together data from various U.S. data repositories. With this data we created our own ALICE data for the most populous counties within the contiguous United States for the near 10 year period from 2005 to 2013. In addition, we developed a dynamic interactive web based tool to display ALICE data for any user specified geographic region in the U.S. By placing the raw data on the web it is possible for anyone to read, analyze and validate the inferences from this Big Data repository.